earg alumnae/i
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Stacey Dearing Stacey Dearing is currently Teaching Assistant Professor of English at Siena College in Loudonville, NY. Stacey received her BA in English and History from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI in 2009, completed her MA in literature at Auburn University in Auburn, AL in 2012, and received her PhD in early American literature from Purdue University in 2018. Her dissertation, “Providential Narratives and Remarkable Bodies: Illness and Disability in Early America, 1650-1776,” expands the field of narrative medicine to include texts composed prior to the post-modern period; the text explores issues of agency in early American letters, diaries, missionary tracts, and medical treatises in order to analyze the ways individuals use writing and narrative strategies to shape and establish meaning for their medical experiences. In addition, she works on Native American literature, women’s literature, and material culture. Stacey served as EARG’s president from 2015-2017, was the webmaster from 2014-2016, and, in 2015, she was the co-chair for EARG’s 9th annual graduate student colloquium.
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Rebekah mitseinRebekah Mitsein is Assistant Professor of eighteenth-century British literature at Boston College. Her dissertation, “Africa is Always Bringing forth Something New: African Worlds and Worldviews in British Enlightenment Literature, 1660-1780,” argues that African places, peoples, and ideas influenced early eighteenth-century British literature in significant, traceable ways that shaped Enlightenment notions about the self and world. Additional interests include fiction and drama of the eighteenth century, trans-Atlantic studies, early American and Caribbean literature, and African literature. Her work has appeared in Studies in Travel Writing and The Eighteenth-Century Common, and she has an essay forthcoming from the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies in January 2016. She received her BA from St. Cloud State University (St. Cloud, MN) in 2008 and her MA from Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA) in 2011. She was EARG’s colloquium chair in 2012-13 and served as EARG's treasurer from 2013-2015.
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mary beth harrisMary Beth Harris is currently a lecturer with the Purdue Language and Cultural Exchange (PLACE) program. She has a seemingly paradoxical interest British female authorship and masculinity in the eighteenth century. Her research (and dissertation) combines these two arenas by looking at female author's male characters as vessels for crafting and interrogating emergent eighteenth-century forms of masculinity. Her other interests include eighteenth-century readership and its relationships to genres, philosophy, prose fiction (especially amatory fiction and the emergent novel), and genre and form. Mary Beth graduated with a BA in Philosophy and English literature from Saint Mary's College of Notre Dame in 2009; she went on to received her MA in English Literature from Villanova University in 2011. She has been a member of EARG since 2012. In 2014 she was the EARG colloquium chair, and she served as EARG's president 2014-2015.
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Matt BastnagelMatt Bastnagel hails from the state of Indiana and he’s always been interested in American literature. When he started graduate school, he took a class with Dr. Bross called “Fighting Words,” which was about the Pequot War. This class converted him, since the strange happenings of this early war fascinated him. His research interests include antebellum literature, American romanticism, and the frontier.
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JOY A. J. HOWARDJoy A. J. Howard is a Visiting Instructor of English at St. Joseph's University. Her dissertation, "The Discourse of Spirit Possession in Early America," is interested in the way the body was represented in these narratives and how issues of race and gender intersected with stories of possession before and after the Salem witchcraft crisis. Joy has written about Julia A. J. Foote, a nineteenth century holiness evangelist in Legacy and three seventeenth century women writers, Anna Maria van Schurman of the Netherlands, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of New Spain and Anne Bradstreet of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in Prose Studies.
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REBECCA BOSSIERebecca Bossie earned her Master’s Degree from University of Texas at El Paso in 2009. Although she thought that she was going to be an archaeologist, she soon realized that her real passion was American literature. Her research interests include the transatlantic gothic, national literature, and the family. She currently resides in El Paso, Texas with her husband, Steve, her pup, Eddie, and her three guinea pigs, Chewie, Lando, and Fluff.
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CASSANDER L. SMITHCassie came to Purdue in 2002 with visions of becoming a rich and famous
novelist – okay, maybe not rich and famous but a novelist all the same. She left Purdue in the fall of 2009 a scholar of early American literature – and still an aspiring novelist. Her dissertation
examines representations of people of African descent in 16th and 17th century
discovery, travel, and legal narratives written in or about the Americas. She
is interested in the relationship between the history of Africans in America
and the formation of American literature. She has presented work on figures
such as Estevan from Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 travel narrative,
Panamanian Cimarrons from Sir Francis Drake’s 1626 pirate narrative, and Tituba
and Candy, two slaves accused of witchcraft during the infamous 1692 Salem
Witch Trials. She is an associate professor at the University of Alabama.
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MEGAN MORTONDr. Morton received her Ph.D. from Purdue in 2009 and beginning in the fall of 2009 will be teach at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, PA
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SABINE KLEINDr. Klein received her Ph.D. from Purdue in 2008. She is currently Associate Professor of English at University of Maine-Farmington.
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NICOLE LIVENGOODDr. Livengood received her Ph.D. from Purdue in 2008. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Marietta College in Marietta, OH where she teaches composition, the Early American Survey, and Diversity in American Literature. The fact that she remains sane and happy after her first year as a professor is testimony to the fabulous mentoring and teaching she received as an EARG-er. Dr. Livengood remembers fondly the moment when she realized that EARG had crystallized into an "honest to goodness academic and mentoring community. The feeling of accomplishment made the administrative hassles and growing pains worth it!"
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Nicholas K. MohlmannA native Virginian, Nick Mohlmann holds a BA in English from George Mason University and an MA in English from the University of Maine. After an errand into the wilderness of contemporary American avant-garde poetry, Nick came to the field of early American studies through the enthusiasm and encouragement of Drs. Bross and Lukasik. His interests include early American poetry and poetics, early American drama and performance, Southern literature, and the cultural legacy of United States presidents. His dissertation is on the poetry and poetics of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. He currently resides in Lafayette with his two cats, Princess Ozma and The Gump.
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Elyssa TardifElyssa has been a member of EARG since she took Prof. Bross' "Fighting Words" course in the fall of 2005 when she was whisked away from the intrigue of Victorian Studies by those persnickety Puritans. She received her M.A. from Purdue in 2006; her thesis involved a translation of and critical introduction to a published memoir written by her great-great-aunt Elioza Fafard Lacasse, who spent her childhood in a lighthouse on the mouth of the St. Lawrence River where her father served as lighthouse keeper. Elyssa is passionate about early American women's history and lived experience, material culture, early 19th-century photography, and amassing copious amounts of inexpensive antiques and family heirlooms. Her dissertation project is interested in the legacy forged by 18th-century American women as expressed through wills, other legal documents, and material artifacts.
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BRIAN YOTHERSDr. Yothers is Professor of English and Associate Chair of the English Department at University of Texas at El Paso, where he has taught since completing his Ph.D. in early and nineteenth-century American Literature at Purdue in 2004. He teaches primarily courses in American literature from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, and he also sometimes teaches a course on transatlantic Gothic fiction. Dr. Yothers is the author of The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790-1876 (Ashgate, 2007) and a co-editor of Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing. He is also a contributing scholar for Melville's Marginalia Online, for which he is writing the notes and introduction for an electronic edition of Melville's marginalia in his copy of The New Testament and Psalms.
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HARRY CLARK MADDUXDr. Maddux earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue in 2001. Since then, he has been a visiting assistant professor at Michigan State University, assistant professor and coordinator of English Graduate Studies at Tennessee State University, and is now an assistant professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. Dr. Maddux has published several articles and presented at numerous conferences in the fields of Puritan Studies and Service-Learning. His article, "God's Responsibility: Narrative Choice and Providential History in Mather's Biblia Americana Commentary on Ezra," appeared in volume 42 of Early American Literature. He is one of a team of editors working to publish Cotton Mather's magisterial Biblia Americana. His volume, containing Mather's commentaries on Ezra through the Psalms, is scheduled for completion and publication in 2012. He has been asked, and has agreed, to co-edit an additional volume (John and Acts) in this series with Prof. Rick Kennedy at Point Loma Nazarene University.
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THERON FRANCISTheron Francis finished up his Thoreau wilderness aesthetics dissertation in 2007 with the help of Drs. Hughes, Flory, Allert, and Schneider. He lives with his son, cats, and lizards in a shack in an orange orchard on a ranch on the Mexican border, where he has found marginal employment teaching linguistics and literature at UT-Pan American.
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HELEN HUNTHelen earned her Ph.D. in 2015. Her interests include female sexuality in the Early American novel. Her dissertation explores dynamics of erotic dominance and submission in these novels and how, in particular, these dynamics produce pleasure for female characters as they take up dominant and submissive positions with a range of erotic objects. Her additional interests include the nature of female community, epistolarity, and nineteenth century women's poetry. She received her M.A. in Literature with an emphasis in creative writing from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, in 2009 and her B.A. from the same university in 2007. She served as EARG's president from 2012-2014, and she was the Colloquium Chair from 2011-2012.
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April PhillipsApril Phillips took a circuitous route to arrive at her interest in early American literature. She began her academic career with a degree in Conservation Biology, followed with a Master’s in Human Dimensions of Ecosystem Science and Management. After spending 3 years in the field of Environmental Education, she became enthralled with the early American period while reading the writings of 17th century explorer William Wood. Her current interests include early American science and medicine, transatlantic scientific exchange, and early American almanacs and print media.
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Rachel Lacasse-FordRachel LaCasse-Ford's research area is in postcolonial studies. She wrote her MA thesis on the Māori short story (of 20th-century Aotearoa/New Zealand), but her interests also lie in eighteenth-century British travel narratives from the Pacific. She received her BA in English from Metropolitan State University (St. Paul, MN) in 2009.
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Andre MorrellAndre Morrell is a recent convert to Early American Literature. Having focused on Theory and Criticism as an undergraduate, he seeks to apply theoretical approaches he’s been developing to questions of Ethics, Christianity, Community, and Native American experiences in the Americas. Andre worked as a Master's student in the English department.
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MArie Balsley TaylorMarie Balsley Taylor is interested in seventeenth-century Puritan and Quaker missionary narratives. Her dissertation is on conflicting Protestant and Native American theological interpretations of suffering. Marie came to Purdue interested in contemporary Native American literature but was lured back to the seventeenth-century when she realized that she actually liked reading Puritan sermons. She received her BA in English and French from Bethel University (St. Paul, MN) and her MA in English from Georgetown University (Washington DC).
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